The treecat in her lap looked up at her, but without the laughing deviltry his eyes would have held under other circumstances. Instead, it seemed to take all the energy he had just to turn his head, for poor Nimitz was stretched out as flat as his crookedly healed ribs and crippled right mid-limb and pelvis would permit while he panted miserably. Even his tail was flattened out to twice its normal width. Sphinx's winters were both long and cold, requiring thick, efficient insulation of its creatures, and treecats' fluffy coats were incredibly warm and soft.
Being suddenly dropped into a hot rain forest Nimitz is a.) hot and miserable and b.) shedding like crazy.
Feet swished through the low-growing, perpetually wet fern-like growth that covered every open space, and Honor's half-smile grew stronger as Alistair McKeon and Warner Caslet circled around in front of her. Like most of the other members of their small party, both of them had chopped their liberated Peep-issue pants into raggedly cut off shorts and wore only sweat-stained tee-shirts above the waist. Well, that and the ninety-centimeter bush knife each of them had slung over his left shoulder. McKeon also carried a heavy, military issue pulser (also Peep issue) holstered at his right hip, and a pair of badly worn boots—the last surviving element of his Manticoran uniform—completed his ensemble.
The Manties wouldn't remove or alter the uniforms in captivity, but bow before the climate. Fair enough.
"We're right in the middle of the equatorial zone here, and I understand from Chief Harkness that the higher temperate zones can be quite pleasant."
"Sure they can." McKeon snorted, and flipped a spatter of sweat off his forehead. "I understand the temperature gets all the way down to thirty-five degrees—at night at least—up in the high arctic."
Kidding, of course.
In fact, Caslet and McKeon had become good friends during their time aboard Tepes and after their escape, but there was still that unavoidable edge of tension. Whatever else Warner Caslet might be, he was—technically, at least—still an officer of the People's Navy. Honor liked him a great deal, and she trusted him, yet that invisible line of separation still existed. And Caslet knew it as well as she did. In fact, he was the one who had quietly suggested to her that it would probably be a good idea if no one offered to issue him a pulser or a pulse rifle, and his departure to refill his and McKeon's canteens was typical of his habit of tactfully defusing potential awkwardnesses. But she still didn't know exactly what they were going to do with him.
There is that awkwardness. Caslet may have come with them, may be passionately anti-StateSec, but he's not anti-Peep. Man swore an oath and he's the sort who takes that kind of thing seriously.
His head went back and he drank deeply, eyes closed in sensual ecstasy as the icy liquid flowed down his throat. Because it was intended for Honor, it was laced with protein builders and concentrated nutrients in addition to the electrolytes and other goodies Dr. Montoya insisted on adding to everyone else's drinking water. They gave an odd, slightly unpleasant edge to its taste, but the sheer decadence of its coldness brushed such minor considerations aside.
Honor is still half-starved after a couple weeks, so even her water has supplements.
A part of her resented the way that Montoya insisted on "pampering" her. She tried to disguise her discomfort with a light manner, but it seemed dreadfully unfair to her, particularly when everyone else in their little party of castaways had done so much more than she to make their escape possible. At the same time, she knew better than to argue. She'd been injured far more seriously than any of the others during their desperate breakout, and she'd been more than half-starved even before that. Despite the difference in their ranks, Surgeon Commander Montoya had flatly ordered her to shut up and let him "fatten her back up," and it often seemed to her that every other member of her tiny command kept saving tidbits from their own rations for her.
Not that "tidbit" was actually a word she would normally consider applying to Peep emergency rations. Prior to her arrival on Hell, she'd thought nothing could possibly taste worse than RMN e-rats.
Everyone else is contributing bits of their own meals to feed Honor's starved and tweaked heavy appetite. And, naturally, bitching about the food.
“And Jasper and Anson ran into another of those bear-bobcat thingamies that was just as ill-tempered as the other two we've met." He made a disgusted sound. "It's a damned shame the local beasties don't know they can't digest us. Maybe they'd leave us alone if they did."
"Maybe not, too," Honor replied, stroking the comb up and down against her thigh to clear a clot of Nimitz fur from its teeth. "There are quite a few things people—or treecats—can't digest very well, or even at all, that they still love the taste of. For all you know your bearcat might be perfectly happy to spend the afternoon munching on you. It might even consider you a low-calorie snack!"
Being, you know, just animals, the local fauna have no concept of left-folded vs. right-folded proteins. They see an animal, it's food or a threat. Well, if they keep blasting at every beastie to rear it's head, that'll help settle them firmly in the latter category.
Each of their two hijacked Peep assault shuttles was sixty-three meters in length, with a maximum wingspan of forty-three meters and a minimum span of over nineteen even with the wings in full oversweep for parking efficiency. Fervently as every member of their group might curse the hot, wet, rot-ridden, voracious jungle, hiding something the size of those two craft would have been an impossible challenge in most other kinds of terrain. As it was, the individual trees which supported the uppermost layer of the overhead canopy were just far enough apart that the pilots had been able to nudge their way between the thick trunks without actually knocking them over. And once the shuttles were down, the cammo netting which had been part of their standard supplies, coupled with the jungle's vines, lianas, fronds, leaves, branches, and tree trunks had made concealing them a straightforward task. The sheer grunt labor involved in spreading the nets with only seventeen sets of hands and just four portable grav lifters available for the job had been daunting, but the alternative had been a great motivator. They'd all had more than enough of the Office of State Security's hospitality.
Size of the assault shuttles, which we've already established as half again that of a pinnace. 63 meters long with a 19-43 meter (variable geometry wings) wingspan or 207 feet with a 62-141 ft. wingspan. Concealment of the assault shuttles.
"Actually," she went on, "I think their power converters may even be a bit better than ours are. They're a little bulkier and a lot more massive, but I suspect their output's higher on a weight-for-weight basis."
-snip-
McKeon had so far given only the most rudimentary consideration to what to do next. Getting the escapees down in one piece, convincing the Peeps they were all dead in order to head off any search parties, hiding the assault shuttles against accidental detection, and exploring their local environs had been quite enough to keep him busy. Yet he suspected Honor was already several steps along in working out their next move, and he was certain those shuttles were central to whatever she had in mind. But Hell's climate could not have been intentionally designed to be more brutal on delicate electronics and machinery. Senior Chief Barstow's work parties were kept busy on a daily business, pruning back the vines and other undergrowth which insisted on trying to infiltrate the intakes for the shuttles's turbines or crawl up into the electronics bays through open landing gear doors. For all that, the shuttles' battle steel hulls were undoubtedly immune to anything even Hell could throw at them, but high humidity, high temperature, and the mold, mildew, and fungus which came with that kind of environment could eat the guts right out of them, leaving nothing but useless shells.
That was why it was as essential to keep their environmental systems up and running as it was to keep the local plant life outside them, but doing that required power. Not a lot of it compared to even a small starship, perhaps, but a hell of a lot when it came to hiding a power plant from overhead sensors. Of course, they'd been careful to land on the far side of the planet from the island HQ where StateSec's garrison of prison guards hung out, and so far as Harkness had been able to determine when he raided Tepes' computers, the Peeps hadn't planted any of their prison colonies within a thousand kilometers of their present location. All of which meant that, logically, there should be no reason for the Peeps to be looking for anything out here in the middle of the jungle.
Neither Alistair McKeon nor Honor Harrington were particularly fond of including words like "should" in their planning, however. And even if there hadn't been the possibility of detection by satellite or airborne sensors, running the shuttles' onboard fusion plants would quickly have eaten up their available reaction mass even at standby levels.
But the Peeps who'd planned the equipment list for those shuttles had provided them with at least twice the thermal converter capability an equivalent Manticoran small craft would have boasted. Although the intention had probably been for the converters to provide power to recharge weapon power packs and other small items of personal gear, they also produced—barely—enough power to keep both shuttles' environmental plants on-line. Temperatures inside the craft were several degrees higher than anyone would have kept them in regular service, but the interiors felt downright frigid compared to the jungle's external temperatures, and the dehumidifiers kept the all-invasive humidity at bay.
The need for environmental systems. The creeping jungle can't harm the hull but can ruin the electronics and engines and they sort of need those. Peep thermal converters, which naturally convert heat into electricity, are bulkier than the Manty version, but actually more efficient on a pound-by-pund basis, and they issue twice as many in their survival gear so power (that won't light up any satellite sensors that may or may not be there) is not a problem.
"I want Harkness, Scotty, and Russ to break out the satellite com gear and figure out a way to sneak into the Peep com system."
-snip-
"For now, all I want to do is find a way to listen to their traffic and get a feel for their procedures. Eventually, we may need to see if we can't hack our way into Camp Charon's computers, as well."
"That's a tall order with the gear we've got here," McKeon warned. "The hacking part, I mean. And unless they're total idiots, there's no way their central systems would accept reprogramming from a remote location."
"I know. I'm not thinking of programming, only of stealing more data from them. And if things work the way I'd like them to, we may never have to do even that. But I want the capability in place if it turns out that we need it. And if Harkness can hack the central computers of a StateSec battlecruiser with only a minicomp, I figure he's got to have a pretty fair shot at infiltrating a simple com net. Especially since the bad guys 'know' no one else on the entire planet has any electronic capability at all."
Step one, monitor enemy communications and possibly hack their net to steal data.
"You're a hedonist, Mayhew," Sanko growled.
"Nonsense. I'm simply the product of a hostile planetary environment," Mayhew said comfortably. "It's not my fault if that sort of insecure life experience imposes survival-oriented psychoses on people. All us Graysons get horribly nervous when we have to operate out in the open, with unfiltered air all around us." He gave a dramatic shudder. "It's a psychological thing. Incurable. That's the real reason Lady Harrington assigned me to this, you know. Medical considerations. Elevated pulse and adrenaline levels." He shook his head sadly. "It's a terrible thing to require this sort of air-conditioned luxury solely for medical reasons."
Again, clearly joking but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a kernel of truth to it. Growing up on Grayson you probably hear a lot of warnings about going outside without taking proper precautions, don't mess with the air filters etc. So I'd actually be surprised if most Graysons weren't just a bit agoraphobic.
It should have been simple, Sanko thought balefully. After all, the Peeps had a planet-wide com net whose security they trusted totally, for reasons which made perfectly good sense. Not only did the StateSec garrison have the only tech base and power generation facilities on the entire planet, but their com messages were all transmitted using the latest in secure equipment. Well, not the absolute latest, even by Peep standards, but pretty darn good. Sanko was a communications specialist himself, and the SS's equipment was considerably better than any of the classified Navy briefings he'd attended had suggested it ought to be. Not as good as the Star Kingdom's, but better than it should have been, and Camp Charon had received the very best available when it was built.
Fortunately, Hell seemed to have fallen a bit behind on its upgrades since then. The planetary garrison had an impressive satellite net—why shouldn't they, when counter-grav made it dirt cheap to hang comsats and weather sats wherever you wanted them?—but their ground stations were getting a little long in the tooth. And, of course, the people they didn't know were trying to eavesdrop on them just happened to have a pair of assault shuttles which, up until very recently, had also belonged to StateSec . . . and had been fitted with the very latest in secure communication links.
That mix of paranoia and carelessness. They trust absolutely in the security of their comms, fair enough, though we'll get into the ways that's a problem in a bit. They have tons of communication and weather satellites, because spacelift is cheap, but haven't upgraded their ground stations in decades. Oh yes, and they don't actually use their fancy comm net that often, because they all live on one island facility, but when they do the lack of comm discipline is shocking.
Worse, the shuttles had extremely limited computer support compared to their Allied equivalents. What they needed for flight ops, fire support missions, troop drops, and that sort of thing was adequate—not great, but adequate. But most functions that weren't absolutely essential were done the old-fashioned way . . . by hand, or at least by extremely specific, canned software so limited, and with such crude heuristic functions, it made a man want to sit down and cry.
The Peep assault shuttles have far less computing power and capabilities than a Manty pinnace, so they can't even tell the computers to record any signals and chime when receiving.
Contrary to the works of the pre-space poet Dante, Hell had four continents (and one very large island that didn't quite qualify as continent number five), not nine circles. For the most part, neither State Security nor the exploration crews who'd originally surveyed the planet seemed to have been interested in wasting any inventiveness on naming those landmasses, either, and the continents had ended up designated simply as "Alpha," "Beta," "Gamma," and "Delta." Someone had put a little thought into naming the island, though Honor personally found the idea of calling it "Styx" a little heavy-handed, but that was about the limit of their imaginativeness. Nor did she find the repetitions on the motif which had gone into naming the planet's three moons Tartarus, Sheol, and Niflheim particularly entertaining. Oh course, no one had been interested in consulting her at the time the names were assigned, either.
Working from the information Harkness had managed to secure before staging their escape, McKeon had grounded the shuttles on the east coast of Alpha, the largest of the four continents. That put them just over twenty-two thousand kilometers—or almost exactly halfway around the planet—from Camp Charon's island home on Styx.
That's just disheartening that is. There's so many more good, hell/underworld themed names.
But as Honor had hoped, the Peeps seemed to be rather more garrulous when it came time to make their grocery runs to the various camps.
"How many of their birds did you get IFF codes on, Russ?" she asked.
"Um, nine so far, Ma'am," Sanko replied.
"And their encryption?"
"There wasn't any, Ma'am—except for the system autoencrypt, that is. That was pretty decent when it was put in, I suppose, but our software is several generations newer than theirs. It decrypts their traffic automatically, thanks to our satellite tap, and we downloaded all the crypto data to memory, of course." He eyed his Commodore thoughtfully. "If you wanted to, Ma'am, we could duplicate their message formats with no sweat at all."
Because the comm-net is known to be totally secure, no effort is wasted on encryption, besides a dated auto-encrypt that any StateSec comm will cut right through.
However confident the present proprietors of Hell had become, the people who'd originally put the prison planet together eighty-odd years ago for the old Office of Internal Security had built what were then state-of-the-art security features into their installations. Among those features was a communications protocol which automatically challenged and logged the identity of the sender for every single com message, but it appeared the current landlords were less anxious about such matters than their predecessors had been. They hadn't gone quite so far as to pull the protocol from their computers, but they were obviously too lazy to take it very seriously. Camp Charon's central routing system simply assigned each shuttle a unique code derived from its Identification Friend or Foe beacon and then automatically interrogated the beacon whenever a shuttle transmitted a message. All transmissions from any given shuttle thus carried the same IFF code so the logs could keep track of them with no effort from any human personnel.
Hades security then and now. I actually like the IFF code and challenge as a security measure.
For the rest of it, rather than bother themselves with changing authentication codes often enough to provide any sort of genuine security, those human personnel relied on an obsolete, canned encryption package which was worse than no security system at all. If anyone ever even bothered to think about it—which Honor doubted happened very often—the fact that they had a security screen in place helped foster the kind of complacency which kept them from considering whether or not it was a good screen. And almost as important as that gaping hole in their electronic defenses, only Champ Charon's central switchboard computers worried about authenticating the source of a transmission at all. As far as the human operators seemed to be concerned, the fact that a message was on the net in the first place automatically indicated it had a right to be there.
Which opens all sorts of doors for unscrupulous and clever individuals.
"You figure that they'll settle for querying our IFF."
"I think that's exactly what they'll settle for. Why shouldn't they? They own every piece of flight-capable hardware on the planet, Alistair. That's why they're lazy. They'd probably assume simple equipment malfunction, at least initially, even if they got a completely unidentifiable beacon return, because they know any bird they see has to be one of theirs." She snorted. "Scan techs have been making that particular mistake ever since a place called Pearl Harbor back on Old Earth!"
Why Honor is willing to risk a flight. That and they don't have too many options besides sitting and waiting for the food to run out.
“As nearly as Scotty and I can figure out, there are at least a half-million prisoners down here."
-snip-
"Remember that they've been dumping what they considered to be their real hard cases here for eighty T-years, My Lady. We've got fairly hard numbers on the military POWs they've sent here. Most of them are from the various star systems the Peeps picked off early on, from Tambourine to Trevor's Star. You had to be a pretty dangerous fellow to get sent to Hell, of course—sort of the cream of the crop, the kind of people who were likely to start building resistance cells if you were left to your own devices. Of course, if State Security had been running things at that point, they probably would've just shot the potential troublemakers where they were and saved themselves the bother of shipping them out here.
"At any rate, there weren't very many additions to the POW population for about ten years before they attacked the Alliance, and the nature of the POWs sent here since the war started is a bit different from what I'd expected." Honor raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "If I were StateSec, and I had a prison whose security I felt absolutely confident about, that's where I'd send the prisoners I figured had really sensitive information. I could take my time getting it out of them, and I'd have complete physical security while I went about it—they couldn't escape, no one could break them out, and for that matter, no one could even know that was where I had them, since the location of the system itself was classified. But StateSec apparently prefers to do its interrogating closer to the center of the Republic, probably on Haven itself. Instead of using Hell as a holding area for prize prisoners, they've been using it as a dumping ground. People who make trouble in other camps get sent here, where they can't get into any more mischief."
Hades demographics. 50 million souls, a whole lot of the most troublesome POWs, leavened with political prisoners.
"According to the best numbers Scotty and I could come up with, we figure there are between a hundred eighty and two hundred thousand military prisoners down here. It could run as high as two hundred and fifty, but that's a maximum figure. The other three or four hundred thousand are civilians. About a third of those were shipped out after various civilian resistance groups from conquered planets were broken up, but most are the more usual run of political prisoners."
Resistance fighters, have we got resistance fighters. Cheaper by the thousand.
"A high percentage of them are from Haven itself, with the biggest single block of them from Nouveau Paris," Mayhew told her. "Apparently, both InSec and StateSec concentrated their housecleaning on the capital."
"Makes sense," McKeon said again. "Authority in the PRH has always been centralized, and every bit of it passes through the command and control nodes on Haven. Whoever controls the capital controls the rest of the Republic, so it's not unreasonable for them to want to make damned sure potential troublemakers on Haven were under control. It'd probably work, too. 'Hey, Prole! You get uppity around here, and—Pffft! Off to Hell with you!' Except that since the Harris Assassination, they've been sending off 'elitists' instead of 'proles,' of course."
Not that Manticore is any better. Oh, yes they give station commanders on the sharp edge a lot more autonomy and trust, but don't imagine for a moment that who controls Manticore doesn't control the Star Kingdom.
"No doubt," Honor said. "But having them here in such numbers could certainly throw a spanner into the works for us." McKeon looked a question at her, and she made a brushing-away gesture. "I wouldn't want to generalize, but I can't help thinking political prisoners would probably be more likely, on average, to collaborate with StateSec."
An awful lot of political prisoners will have been put in by the
old regime and, assuming they've been told anything of events in the wider galaxy, may be eager to prove their revolutionary credentials.
"As nearly as we can tell," Mayhew went on, "the camp populations average about twenty-five hundred personnel, which means they've got approximately two hundred sites in all. Obviously, there are none at all up here on Styx Island—Camp Charon itself is purely a staging point and central supply depot for the other sites—but the mainland camps are all a minimum of five hundred kilometers from one another. That spreads them out too much for the inmates of any camp to coordinate any sort of action with any other camp, given that the only way they could communicate would be to make physical contact."
2500 or so to a prison camp, of which there are 200. Set at least 500 klicks apart. That's a bit over a week by foot, assuming there aren't interesting terrain obstacles. Faster, if there are two camps on the same river or body of water. The point being the camps are close enough to have some contact, if they're clever and determined enough, though you'd think with a whole planet's landmass to play with even 200 camps could be spaced further apart.
"A month," Honor murmured. She contemplated something only she could see once again, then nodded. "All right, Alistair," she said crisply, "that gives us a time window for any given camp, anyway. And I think Jasper's probably right, that they do make a major supply effort once a month. If so, we've got some idea of the interval we have to work with. All we need to do is figure out what we're going to do with it."
I admit I was wrong. Monthly, not weekly, food drops.
"Well," he said now, "it seems that there's one prisoner camp here on Alpha that doesn't have a number." Marchant leaned back in his chair with a questioning expression, and Tremaine smiled at him. "It's got a name, instead: Camp Inferno. And it's not exactly prime real estate. As a matter of fact, it's the only camp on the entire planet that's located directly on the equator."
Camp Inferno, the equatorial camp, is where they put the hardcore hell-raisers who aren't deterred even by Hades' formidable security. Presumably these prisoners are still considered too valuable to simply shoot or starve out.
"That's because this is our original map, and Inferno isn't on it," Tremaine told him. "When Jasper and I generated the original, we used an old camp survey from Tepes' files, and this one wasn't listed. But yesterday Russ pulled a major telemetry download from the weather sats. It included weather maps for Alpha, with the camp sites indicated, including half a dozen that're new since the file survey we used was last updated. Like these." He tapped a key and new red dots appeared on his display, one of them flashing brightly. "And lo and behold, there was this camp we hadn't mapped sitting dead center on Alpha where it shouldn't have been. So when I came on watch this afternoon, I started trying to chase it down. I thought at first that it was just another new camp, but then I found this—" he tapped more keys and the display changed again, transmuting into a terse StateSec internal memo "—in one of Tepes' secure files on Hades, and it turns out it's not a new camp at all. The survey just hadn't mapped it—apparently for security reasons."
"I see." Marchant said, and smothered a smile, for Tremaine had added the last phrase in tones of profound disgust that he understood only too well. None of the Manticoran or Grayson castaways had yet been able to figure out what sort of reasoning (or substitute therefor) StateSec called upon when it decided when it was going to get security conscious and when it wasn't, but the logic tree involved promised to be twistier than most.
Again,
Tepes had confidential memos on Inferno, but didn't have the site on their planetary map because of... security? On the pleasure yacht of one of the Triumvirate, with a double complement of StateSec infantry, they didn't have the confidence to record the location of this one camp but were happy to include the others?
It should have been a fairly short hop. Camp Inferno was only about fourteen hundred kilometers from their original landing site, which would have been less than a twenty-minute flight at max for one of the shuttles. But they didn't dare make the trip at max. They thought they'd located all of the recon satellites they had to worry about, and if they were right, they had a three-hour window when they ought to be clear of observation. But they couldn't be certain about that. There could always be one they'd missed, and even if there hadn't been, simple skin heat on a maximum-speed run might well be picked up by the weather satellites parked in geosynchronous orbit. So instead of high and fast, they would go low and slow, at less than mach one. Not only that, they would make the entire flight without counter-grav, which would both hide them from gravitic detectors and reduce power requirements enough that there would be no need to fire up their shuttles' fusion plants.
Flight entirely on thrusters, below the speed of sound which is apparently crawling in Honorverse aircraft terms. At shortly above treetop level, with only the Mark One eyeball to help them spot a Bronze Age encampment in the dark.
Yeah, they make it, and after only a couple hours of looking.
